Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Lefty-Backbiting Brouhaha

You'd have to have been living under a rock the last 24 hours not to have caught the Lefty-Backbiting Brouhaha over at Tom Watson's place. An individual traveling under the monicker Pachacutec posted a screed at FireDogLake in which he said of Democratic Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher, "She can slurp the gnarly nub of power with the very best, gamely grinning to the gushing finish: a working girl's working girl."

Tom called him on his misogyny:

But in a world where a hero like Mukhtar Mai of Pakistan overcomes court-ordered gang rape and a corrupt regime to help educate the children of her attackers, we kid ourselves that we're advanced enough, cool enough, hip enough, or evolved enough to throw around this low-brow gender-based garbage and think it won't stick - to us, to the left, to the Democrats, to our candidates, to our movement.

Tauscher is an evil, crabbed, nasty individual; no arguments here. In general, I ignore blogs of both the right and the left that wallow in rancorous denunciation of whoever's happened to piss them off in the last ten minutes, and I believe the health and well-being of my liver is the better for it.

OK. Passion of the moment, blah blah. Anybody can look stupid when angry. Happens all the time.

I'm not particularly offended by the blatant misogyny employed to characterize Tauscher. I see worse fifteen times a day on Comedy Central. I think Tom's comment thread contains a lot of rote lifting of skirts and automated feminist scolding. If you're offended by the word "cunt" as a term of opprobrium, you'd probably better stay out of Britain, where it's extremely common currency among both sexes. As I've observed before, the blogosphere is a tiny, tiny, tiny little cross-section of the American voting public, and what some idiot hothead said on FireDogLake in November of 2006 has zippy chance of becoming an issue in some future election.

No, what pisses me off about Pachacutec's awful, hateful screed is the fact that he went for the cheap laugh by calling his object-of-the-moment a whore. And then turned around and called it "punk."

Pach', kid: Punk happened.Note tense. This weekend I loitered in Claire's Boutique at Tysons Corner Mall while young Betty rooted around for some bauble or another. I was not particularly surprised to find, in among the Hillary Duff-branded bracelets and the Aly and AJ-branded earring collections, a stand dedicated to Green Day-branded necklaces and wristbands for the delectation of teenybopper girls. These treasures came complete with adorable photos of the eyeshadowed lads looking all disaffected and pissed-off, their American Idiot hand-grenades featured prominently on the cheapjack teenaged gauds.

Punk is deader than goddamned Vaudeville. Fuckin' get used to it.

The notion that you can shock, vilify, curse, and gob the bourgeois into recognition of their fundamental uselessness has played, kid. We're shocked, vilified, cursed and gobbed every fucking day by the slime oozing out of our TV sets. We're numb. We've been épaté'd so many times by so many lazy goddamned "revolutionaries" that the sight of some self-appointed artist's hairy moon shining out over the waistband of his dropped pleather pants provokes precisely nothing. We've seen the act, chum. It's easy. It's cheap. It's the laziest, crappiest, most slothful kind of self-indulgence a person can grant himself.

You wanna know how to be a fucking revolutionary, Pachacutec?

How about this: The most revolutionary act you can perform in this fell, death-infected year 2006 is to act like a goddamned adult.

Isn't that just blisteringly clear? Could that be any more self-evident? They act like children, Pach' -- all those bulletheaded, leather-lunged, lantern-jawed jocko-homos down at Little Green Footballs -- if you play their game, you are no better than them. If you, through intellectual laziness and sloppy thinking, go for the cheap laugh at a perceived enemy's expense, you are no better than them. Misogyny's got nowt to do with it -- it's just goddamned lazy to call your opponent a whore and expect to get laffs-n-applause for it.

To continue your metaphor, Guy Lombardo's Royal Canadians played in tune, with precision, and were ashamed -- as adults, professionals, are ashamed -- when a note was clammed, a cue missed, a beat dropped. I once gloried in punk's shambolic sloppiness; but it's become the accepted norm. Now it's just fucking lazy, Bad Musicianship.

"She can slurp the gnarly nub of power with the very best, gamely grinning to the gushing finish: a working girl's working girl."

Now that's a nicely crafted sentence. And I suspect that had such a phrase had been turned in the direction of Babs Bush, or Laura Ingraham, or that psychotic harpy from Atlas Shrugs, it would have been cheers and giggles all 'round.

But to play the punk card is totally lame. Punk was pure attitude with little to back it up, and even the attitude wasn't particularly original. As Pete Townsend observed: "We were the first band to vomit in the bar."

Pachutec made a couple of significant errors. First, he laid this turd in his own party's punchbowl. If you have dead weight on your team, or a cancer in your clubhouse, you just cut 'em. See, e.g., Philadelphia Eagles Football Club v. Terrell Owens, E. Dist. Pa. (2005). You can't blister them like that if you are going to have to keep them around.

Second (and once again, history repeats itself), it's not the crime, it's the cover-up. He could have simply admitted to going over the top, muttered some sincere expression of his frustration re: DINOs, a glancing apology to any sex trade workers who may have been offended, and the tempest would have remained in the teapot.

But no. Instead, this incident has pulled the bandage away from the previously hidden fistula that has been the chronic affliction of progressive/left politics for as long as I can remember. Which, of course, is that we always ... always give our first allegiance to our own personal issues ahead of the ultimate objective.

It's the People's Front of Judea attacking the Judean People's Front, all over again.

Sort of related: I've seen articles recently on the "hip parents who have kids yet refuse to grow up themselves" psuedo-demographic and thought to myself, who gives a shit? What's this got to do with me, or those who don't make the salary that supports this "lifestyle"? What crapola articles are they going to write about these morons when, six fucking months from now, they get their first gray hair?

Sorry. Ranting.

Re punk music, I revere the Clash, as all thinking people should, because they took punk "attitude" and married it to political positions and pissed off vocals. They took punk out of Malcolm MacLaren's boutique and made something of it. Now, I guess it's back in the boutique.

EXACTLY. We would all do well to bear in mind that Nov. 7th was not the revolution. The next two years are going to be tough even if the new majority was a monolith. Being from Rhode Island, I look at this in the context of ex-senator Lincoln Chafee,a Republican enabler reviled by his own party for being too liberal and now unemployed for being too Republican. They needed that (R) more than they needed a true believer in RI, and now they have neither. Tauscher may not be the pride of the Democratic party, but she's not the worst, either (Jefferson & Lieberman own the low end of the gradient, IMO). Anyone who thinks we're not going to see a lot of politics as usual are going to be severely disappointed. Just look at K st. & big pharmas maneuverings & tell me otherwise.It's going to take all of them to reign in the unitary executive, and even that may not be enough.

RE: Green Day... Funny, I saw the same exact thing at a claire's in St. Louis on Black Friday. (I have an 11-year-old.) The "Hilary Duff Stuff" I understood; the Pirates of the Caribbean stuff made sense. But, I just didn't see how the Green Day merchandise fit into it all. I always thought they were going for a strict 90s alternative vibe. Guess I didn't know much about them.

We should come up with a better shorthand for: "Exhibiting a loathsome pattern of behavior that is characterized by worshipfully serving the interests of powerful people out of an apparent desire to gain their favor, aquire respect-by-association and/or simply feel important, while simultaneously, conspicuously, and falsely claiming to be solely motivated by allegiance to high values and principles."

So.... Somebody should do that.

On a related thought, there is a welcome and well-expressed article in Slate http://www.slate.com/id/2154567/nav/tap1/ today that advocates breaking the cultural taboo against hurling some well-aimed misofascistic epithets at certain deserving targets.

Roxtar, I don't agree - I think it's stupid from a tactical perspective and gross frm my own POV to attack Coulter for her gender, sexuality, looks etc.

I didn't mean to imply that it would have been effective or otherwise OK to launch such an attack against Coulter; only that the backlash would have been (IMHO) far less vigorous. Your overarching point, however, is well taken. it is the kind of tactic that tends to blow up in one's face. And in light of the relentless rain of self-inflicted blows sustained by the GOP in recent months, we hardly need to spit in their ocean of embarrassment.

A-freakin' men. Brilliant post. When I read that "punk" comment at Tom's place, I was knocked out of my chair by the sudden burst of ego that blew, airbag-style, out of my monitor. Or maybe I was just on my ass, laughing.

I used to throw "cunt" around quite liberally (ha!) when I first started blogging, but then I realized:

1. Even though I'm fine with that word, many people aren't, and that will probably keep people from reading the rest of my post and getting the point, which is the only thing that matters when you blog.

2. It's too easy.

If FDL is "punk," can I be the Lawrence Welk of the blogosphere? I want to be loved by millions for decades.

"A pattern of behavior that is characterized by worshipfully serving the interests of powerful people out of an apparent desire to gain their favor, aquire respect-by-association and/or simply feel important, while simultaneously, conspicuously, and falsely claiming to be solely motivated by allegiance to high values and principles, is loathesome."

I'd probably be tempted to throw "fuckin'" in there to modify "loathesome," but I'm a punk rocker.

"The relevance of Third Reich Germany to today's America is not that Bush equals Hitler or that the United States government is a death machine. It's that it provides a rather spectacular example of the insidious process by which decent people come to regard the unthinkable as not only thinkable but doable, justifiable."

Anyone ever seen four guys in a POS van driving 200 miles to do a 40 minute gig for beers in front of 12 uncaring poseurs lately?

The Figgs out of NY always do an allages basement show in town before they hit the nightclub for their gig.

Punk's still alive, in the clubs and the basements and in the 13 year old kids picking up their dad's unused guitar out of boredom... Green Day were punk, and maybe still are, but the music machine has co-opted them, it's all assimilation.

The Mekons opted out 15 years ago, and are still making brilliant music, but because they won't take the bait, the machine ignores them...

The Clash (and I love 'em, don't get me wrong) would have been swallowed whole just like Green Day have been, but self destructed first. It nearly killed Mick Jones and did kill Strummer.

A-an' I get no props at all for "Letcher Henderson"??? There's no justice.

Temp. Cos.:

Anyone ever seen four guys in a POS van driving 200 miles to do a 40 minute gig for beers in front of 12 uncaring poseurs lately?

Musos were doing this in 1920, and have never stopped, and I hope they never do.

'S not really what I meant by "Punk is dead." We're operating under different definitions of the word.

I mean the ideology of Punk is dead -- the notion that a population can be shocked out of complacency by anarchist artists. Capitalism deadens any and all effective (ie., popular) dissent by instantly swooping in and appropriating the language of the dissenters and selling it to the punters as "the latest cool thing." It's happened hundreds of times since 1977, when I watched what I think of as "real" Punk become a toothless fashion statement in approximately 15 minutes (April 23, 1977, to be exact).

Terrific post, Neddie. You really got the bit in your mouth on that one.

Punk *is* dead. On the other hand, there's dynamite music out there that sounds like nothing but punk.

I went to the Departed recently (great movie) and was thrilled by a song in the early going. It was I'm shipping up to Boston by the Dropkick Murphys.

I'd never heard of them before (I know, I should get out more), but it reminded me of what I always liked about punk: that straight-ahead rock and roaring lyrics. I never did find the posturing very interesting.

I wonder what the Brits who read this blog and Wolcott's blog and Tom Watson's blog are thinking of this whole dust-up, being that "twunt" (from the words "twat" and "cunt") is now such a common British term among both sexes (as for example here) as to be almost not a cuss word any more ("fuck" having reached that point about a decade ago).

Damn, Neddie. When you blog, you ruin the internet for the rest of us. This is really a great post. I've been thinking about it for a few days now...still great. Have you ever had the experience of having a sort of half-baked feeling-on-the-edge-of-an-opinion that you can't quite articulate, and then you read something that just PERFECTLY crystallizes your vague intuition and makes it clear and rational and succinct? This does that for me: "The most revolutionary act you can perform in this fell, death-infected year 2006 is to act like a goddamned adult."

“But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence . . . truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”

~Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity

Which explains the endurance of punk fashion and a million other things.

The greatest thing about punk - the thing lost in its commodification - was the DIY ethos. Too bad. Our hyperspecialized binary culture could use an injection of do it yourself. Can't sew disorder without it.

The fashion aesthetic always seemed too cartoonish and desperate to be cool. In that manner, the scary KORN kids we ridicule today are very much like the objects of their imitation. Now with dextramethorphan! But that's fashion for ya.

I'm glad to have missed the vortex of punk - the actual lifestyle. It would've killed me. Besides, nihilism is so much richer in middle age.

Punk, an often unfairly maligned musical genre, deserves a more spirited defense, but as everyone here already knows, the debate itself is as cliche as mohawks and nose piercings.

As for the brouhaha: In stark contrast to Neddie's musings and love of language, that's the kind of intralefty discourse I did not miss during my last seven months (mostly) offline. No offense intended, truly.

>1. Even though I'm fine with that word, many people aren't, and that will probably keep people from reading the rest of my post and getting the point, which is the only thing that matters when you blog.